April 21 (Reuters) - Cotton futures snapped a three-day
rally on Thursday, recovering from an initial sell-off driven by
profit booking to settle marginally lower, a day after touching
the highest in 2016.
Traders also took stock of weekly U.S. government data,
which showed sales of upland cotton totaled 104,800 running
bales for the week ending April 15, up 24 percent from the
previous week, but down 10 percent from the prior 4-week
average.
"Once the day session got under way, several recent longs
took profit on the data, especially amid rumors of no physical
demand for U.S. cotton at current prices," said Louis Rose,
independent cotton trader and consultant with Risk Analytics in
Memphis, Tennessee.
China's cotton futures extended a rally on Thursday as
speculative buying pushed prices to the highest in more than a
year in anticipation of tight supplies after Beijing delayed
sales from its state cotton reserves, traders said.

* The July cotton contract on ICE Futures U.S.
settled down 0.08 cent, or 0.12 percent, at 64.01 cents per lb,
after trading within a range of 62.98 and 64.57 cents a lb.
* Total futures market volume fell by 9,948 to 43,647 lots.
Data showed total open interest fell 3,499 to 189,939 contracts
in the previous session.
* China cotton futures on the Zhengzhou Commodity
Exchange were up 0.32 percent to 12,520 yuan per tonne.
* The dollar index was up 0.14 percent. The Thomson
Reuters CoreCommodity CRB Index, which tracks 19
commodities, was down 0.86 percent.

(Reporting by Vijaykumar Vedala in Bengaluru; Editing by Tom
Brown)